Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman is an artistic recreation of history, whose spotlight on the past also has the intended consequence of illuminating the present in all its whiteness.
USA
4*
Director:
Spike Lee
Screenwriters:
Charlie Wachtel
David Rabinowitz
Kevin Willmott
Spike Lee
Director of Photography:
Chayse Irvin
Running time: 135 minutes
America has always been a deeply racist place. From its founding to the American Civil War through Jim Crow, church bombings and lynchings up to the Charleston church shooting and the Charlottesville protests in the past few years, not to mention redlining, racial profiling and the stunningly disproportionate mass incarceration of the country’s black citizens, many (or most) whites have always struggled to accept the idea of racial integration. Perhaps because, for them, integrating meant not only compromising but surrendering their long-standing power.
And yet, in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers proclaimed that “all men are created equal”, even as they conferred a “three-fifths” status upon non-whites via Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution. This tension has underpinned continuous conflict, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 did little to quell the social distrust and downright hatred that had already been festering for centuries.
At the beginning of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, based on a true story, a young black man by the name of Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington) applies to be the first black police officer at the Colorado Springs station. He gets the job, but racist attitudes don’t just vanish like fog before the sun. He is undeterred, however, and quickly works his way into the intelligence division, where he stirs the pot by making a phone call to the Ku Klux Klan to express his alleged interest in joining the infamous white supremacist organisation.
Now, obviously, a black man is not going to rock up to the KKK and infiltrate it, no matter how talented a policeman he is. This is a real story, after all, not a comedy sketch by Dave Chappelle. Stallworth needs a white stand-in, and he finds a willing partner in the form of Flip Zimmerman (mesmerisingly portrayed by Adam Driver), whose Jewish heritage, which would be equally objectionable to the Klan if they ever found out, is luckily less apparent than Stallworth’s blackness.
Zimmerman infiltrates the Klan, which calls itself “the Organization”, by posing as Ron Stallworth, even as the real Stallworth continues to speak unrecognised over the phone with various hardcore white supremacists, including America’s most notorious pro-Aryan celebrity, David Duke. Eventually, Duke and Stallworth strike up such intimate conversations that Duke considers him a friend, little knowing that the colour of their skins is not as he imagines them to be.
Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen, who also played a white supremacist in Dome Karukoski’s outstanding 2013 drama Heart of a Lion, stars here as Felix, easily the most ominous KKK character in the cast. Immediately and continuously suspicious of Zimmerman’s/Stallworth’s intentions, Felix also speaks in such an insidious way it is hard to view him as anything other than a villainous piece of filth. The rest of the Organization’s local chapter is filled out by Walter (Ryan Eggold), who might even pass for a regular Joe outside the hate group, and the dim-witted and/or permanently inebriated “Ivanhoe” (Paul Walter Hauser).
But Spike Lee’s re-telling of this 1970s story is not meant purely as a middle finger to the white supremacists of the era. He makes no bones about connecting the story of racism perpetrated by whites against blacks to present-day America, and by hinting at a link between the Black Panther and Black Lives Matter movements, he also makes clear that history, as the saying goes, may not repeat itself but certainly does rhyme. Sometimes this bridge between the past and the present is so chilling it becomes almost hilarious. One example is the moment when the idea that someone like David Duke might one day occupy the White House is shot down as unrealistic – a self-explanatory subtweet of the 45th president.
At other times, the bridge is devastating: BlacKkKlansman‘s final moments underscore its importance as the first Trump-era Hollywood film to take the worst of the present-day political situation and turn it into art, just as George Clooney did by making Good Night, and Good Luck., a film that used the McCarthy era to make a point about patriotism and the importance of a free press in the midst of George W. Bush’s Iraq War. Lee all but states outright that Donald Trump – with his “America First” slogan with its antisemitic origins and his “good people on both sides” apology for Nazis and white supremacists who chant “blood and soil” and do much worse – is the new head of the KKK. The final scenes in the film are even more powerful than news footage we have seen because they are suddenly fully contextualised as part of a history of hatred and intolerance.
Despite some unnecessarily long-winded stabs at comedy – including an opening sequence with Alec Baldwin playing an inept narrator of a white supremacists’ propaganda video, as well as a screening of Birth of a Nation, in which the viewers’ behaviour is just as over-the-top and overtly racist as in D.W. Griffith’s notoriously anti-black film – this might very well be Spike Lee’s best film since at least 25th Hour and probably since Do the Right Thing.